Playback singer known as the Nightingale of India
Known as the Nightingale of India for the purity of her voice, Lata Mangeshkar, who has died aged
92, was the queen of Bollywood playback singers: over several decades, she recorded songs for thousands of lip-synching film stars. And though her face was not familiar to everyone, her voice certainly was. As well as singing in around
1,000 films, said BBC News, she recorded tens of thousands of songs in 26 languages, and in India they could be heard everywhere: in shops, restaurants, taxis and on the radio. She was herself a woman with a huge range of enthusiasms and interests, from fast cars and cricket to Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Her favourite Hollywood film was The King and I, while her eclectic musical tastes ranged from Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin to Nat King Cole, Barbra Streisand and the Beatles.
“I always think: happiness is for sharing with the world, and sorrow is for keeping to yourself,” she once said.
If she had any competition as a playback singer, it was from her sister Asha (the subject of the Cornershop song Brimful of Asha).
But they were close, and Mangeshkar insisted that they were never rivals. Born in Indore, in what is now Madhya Pradesh state, she was the daughter of a musician and a teacher who ran a touring theatre company. She didn’t go to school, said The Guardian, because she wasn’t allowed to bring her baby sister Asha to class. Much of her childhood was spent singing at religious gatherings alongside her father. He died in 1942, however, leaving Lata as the sole breadwinner, aged 13. She auditioned for film roles, and won a few. But she didn’t enjoy being in front of the camera; she wasn’t comfortable on busy films sets, and was shocked when a director asked her to trim her broad eyebrows. So she decided to try her hand as a playback singer. In 1949, she recorded the song Aayega Aanewala for the film Mahal. It became a huge hit, said The Daily Telegraph, and she never looked back. Over the next few decades, she sang for most of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars, from Meena Kumari and Madhubala in the early days of Bollywood, to the modern entertainer Priyanka Chopra. She sold tens of millions of records, won scores of awards and performed all over the world. Freddie Mercury was among those said to have been influenced by her. She won all of India’s civilian honours; and in 2007, France conferred on her its highest civilian award, Officier de la Légion d’honneur. In 1981, the writer Gopal Krishna said: “Cricket, Lata Mangeshkar and the transistor make India one nation.”